At the Turning of the Tide
by daro-jesse
Summary: AU set at end of DOS; spoilers for BoFA. Dying from the orc's poisoned arrow, Kili falls under Tauriel's healing spell and dreams of his and Fili's death at Erebor. When he wakes, a new adventure begins - but will the second chance he's been given have a happier ending than his nightmare? Anticipated novel-length romance/adventure; many major characters will have a storyline.


The blade was like ice.

So swiftly, so suddenly it plunged down, Kili only had a moment to register the white-hot pain of steel piercing skin, severing tendon, splintering bone; then the length of the orc's sword had plunged straight through his heart, and he went cold, instantly, cold straight into his fingernails, as though his heart had not been pierced, but frozen. He no longer felt the hideous, white, scaly hands on his back; he no longer smelled the blood of his enemies glittering on his gold chainmail, or heard the single, agonized cry Thorin had not been able to swallow as his heir, the closest thing Thorin Oakenshield had ever had to a son - Kili's brother - had fallen down dead at his Kili's boots. _Fili. _The name should have been agony to think, but there was no pain anymore; there was no battle raging before the doors of Erebor; there was no sky, no sun, no snow, no clouds, no mountain.

There was only Tauriel.

A nimbus of light surrounded her. White light. Starlight. _I have always thought it a cold light_, Kili heard himself say, as if in a dream - a dream so real, so precious, he felt a single tear slide down his cheek. _It is memory_, he heard Tauriel insist, in that voice of song and starlight that could only belong to her; and it was like she was saying it to him now, again, as he looked at her, waiting - helplessly - for death to draw him down into the darkness.

Instead, the light grew.

Tauriel was right. It was not a cold light. It was the warm water of the Withywindle that flowed past his mother's house in the Blue Mountains, where Fili (patiently, as Fili had done everything with his brother) had taught him to swim on the long summer nights of childhood, that never seemed to end. It was the laughter of thirteen dwarves around a table in a cozy hobbit hole, with wine and whiskey boiling in their bellies, the promise of wealth and glory and a home at last for their people spread before them on Gandalf's map, as though they had only to march out Bilbo's door to claim it. Kili let the warmth of those memories, and so many others, surround him - he could not move to escape them, though something inside him still struggled, wanting to reach out to Tauriel, wanting to grasp his sword again and drive it through the orc-scum's throat. As the sweet, still light closed over him, shattering at last the image of Tauriel staring, helplessly, back at him, Kili heard her voice again.

She wasn't speaking; she was chanting. The words, in Elvish, meant nothing to Kili; he knew that they were magic, though, by the register with which she uttered them, deep and strong as the roots of the trees she lived among. The words seemed to come to him out of a memory, layered with another voice, that had not yet spoken: _I strayed out of thought and time, and every moment was unto a life-age of this world. _The warmth rushed in on him again, thawing his frozen limbs, blowing apart the voice (was it Gandalf's? Gandalf the Grey's?)...Kili caught a glimpse, just for a moment, of a dream he had had, before Thorin had called them on this quest - a dream he had not recalled upon waking. Then the fire in his limbs grew so painful that he screamed, and would have sat bolt upright, had hands not pushed him roughly back down.

"Lie still," Fili said.

Kili's heart (unpierced, apparently; it was beating again) throbbed hard against his chest. "Fili?" he whispered. "But - how - "

"Ask the she-elf." Fili's tone was cool - grudgingly grateful, which told Kili (he thought this, as the film over his eyes began to clear) something had ruffled his brother's fierce pride. Fili wasn't arrogant, like Thorin, for all that Kili admired him, could be; but Fili was staunchly independent, and the few times in their lives he had needed to ask for help, he had looked just like he did now, with the corners of his mouth pinched down in a solemn glower beneath his golden mustache. "She worked some sort of spell on you," Fili was saying. "Got the orc-poison out."

Poison? No; it couldn't be possible. Shrugging Fili off, Kili managed to sit up. Realization dawned on him slowly. In disbelief, he looked around.

Laketown. They were still in Laketown! Smaug hadn't burned it yet; they were still in the house of the boatman, Bard.

The boatman's daughters - Sigrid, the eldest, with the gray eyes like river-stones, and her younger sister Tilda, still in pigtails - watched him anxiously from the kitchen. Oin was there, fussing with his salves and ointments. The boy, the boatman's son, Bain, was hovering around the hearth, wanting to take action, not sure what that action should be. Kili felt a pang of sympathy for his awkwardness.

Tauriel (he knew this immediately, without needing to look for her) was standing at the door of the small, crowded house. The sunrise breaking over the town caught fire in her silky russet hair; clad in the woodland garb of her people - colors too earthly for someone so ethereal - she stood like a tall young meadow-flower, only her elf-eyes moving, scanning the narrow, wooden streets cut by channels of ice-cold lake-water. The rest of her was still as an arrow pulled taut on the string. She was searching, Kili understood, for the elf-prince, Legolas - determinedly not looking at Kili, who stepped down now from the table he had been laid out on, over the exasperated protests of his brother.

"Brother, we have to leave this place," Kili said, hoarsely. "There is no time to spare. We have to warn the townspeople, get everyone to safety. The dragon - "

"What about the dragon?"

That was the boatman's son, Bain. The boy came forward, ducking under the herbs hanging from the kitchen's low rafters. In another life, Kili thought, he could imagine himself living in a place like this - somewhere warm, and dry, and homey, despite the shadows clinging to its corners, and the smell of fish crowding up against everything. A man could raise his family in a place like this, he thought, and be proud to call it his home.

Of their own accord, his eyes went to Tauriel. She still had not looked at him, though she knew he was awake; she must have. The long, white fingers of one slim hand tightened around the doorframe. Kili's throat tightened, the words he had spoken to her in that dream, or vision, or whatever it had been, burning on his lips. He would say them to her again now, in this reality; he would not waste a single precious moment worrying what she might say back, or what anyone else might think. He started forward -

Bain clutched his arm. The boy's dark eyes were wide. Fili's eyebrows had shot up; he stood to one side, looking bemused, seeming to expect his brother to push the boy-child out of his way. Kili did not. He simply looked up at Bain, who said again, "What about the dragon?"

Kili took a breath. "It's coming," he said.


End file.
